A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN reviews

Despite the fact that the show doesn't officially open until this evening, The Philadelphia Inquirer's review is already up on their website, and it's mixed:

"People in the audience were audibly weeping. Eugene O'Neill's lush last play, the much-revived A Moon for the Misbegotten, still works, although this celebrated production, transferred from London's Old Vic Theatre, seemed disappointingly stagey and unsubtle.

O'Neill's passionate vision of life, his wild riffs on regret and longing, can override his often clunky wordsmithing. But not if the actors labor through the lines as they do here in Act One, illustrating every turn of the plot and every joke with broad strokes. Granted, the play misleadingly begins as farce - the farmer's daughter as a tough, brawling slattern - but even early on, the tragic underpinnings should be felt if not seen.

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Eve Best is too slim for the role of Josie, the "big cow," a woman whose size and strength have distorted her idea of herself. She uses only two voices: one soft, one rough, with no modulation in between, causing one to wonder, where is the suffering girl under the bluffing? Her accent puzzles, as it wanders from American to Irish to English.

But the oddest portrayal is Spacey's as Jim Tyrone; his gestures are so strikingly effeminate that my companion assumed that Tyrone's homosexuality was the secret that had undone his life. Since Spacey is so accomplished an actor, and since he has specialized in O'Neill, I assume this was a theatrical choice - perhaps to create a subtext, perhaps to underscore the Oedipal theme. But it certainly was distracting."

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/weekend/theater/20070409_Moon_stagey__moving.html

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Updated On: 4/9/07 at 12:46 PM

When I saw it on Thursday night, Best, Colm Meaney and the actor playing Mike (I don't have the Playbill in front of me) all spoke with Irish accents, so I figured it was an artistic choice.

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I saw Isherwood there on Friday evening when I went. I don't know if he's reviewing it or not, but he was there. I think it's interesteing that the last 2 revivals of this piece were reviewed by the TIMES for 2 different critics. Clive Barnes & Ben Brantley. Certainly would be another opinion of the piece if it is Isherwood. Unfortunately, I think this production is not nearly as wonderful as the one was in 2000 w/Cherry & Gabriel. Espeically Spacey here, he just didn't bring it home and the play suffered because of it. Best gave a very nice performance though.

https://nycriticscorner.broadwayworld.com/amoonforthemisbegotten.htm

Updated On: 4/9/07 at 04:32 PM

Talkin Broadway is Mixed:

"For despite starring American Oscar winner Kevin Spacey and an estimable British actress named Eve Best, this production - which originated at London’s Old Vic Theatre Company (where Spacey serves as artistic director) - has a solid enough grasp of Earth and its curious inhabitants but little ability to turn its gaze toward the stars.

Director Howard Davies has attempted to strip this Moon of all its ties to the poetic realism that was always O’Neill’s trademark. This is a rather radical reexamination, but perhaps a worthy one to bring to a city that just saw a Broadway revival seven years ago (starring Cherry Jones and Gabriel Byrne), and still tends to speak in hushed tones of the revelatory 1973 production starring Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst. And there are times this approach proves successful, leaving you experiencing much of the visceral pull between Josie Hogan (Best) and Jim Tyrone (Spacey) as they carry their mating-dance tug-of-war to loser-takes-all totality.

But people as small as these two, stumbling through a vast world of duplicity and mask-wearing, are too easily lost when they’re not allowed to ride O’Neill’s text to its outermost emotional conclusions.
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Spacey expertly plays the devoted friend and conflicted lover, whose perception and knowledge of Jodie’s purity (or absence thereof) become the final, fatal tangling in a heart that’s trying to forget how to love. But though he played Jim in Long Day’s Journey on Broadway in 1986 (opposite Jack Lemmon), he now projects himself more like a moody stage-door Johnny than a drunken matinee idol of surpassingly modest skills. Worse, he’s tormented by none of the elegant desperation befitting Jim’s last days, the hopes that have become in the wake of his mother’s death the very bourbon he’s planning to use to drink himself to death. Jim’s eventual disintegration does not sensibly follow from the thoroughly together Everyman Spacey embodies earlier on.

Best acquits herself admirably throughout, especially following that fateful moonlight tryst when the clear light of day reveals all the secrets she and Jim would both prefer kept hid. The bone-shaking pain her one true love both alleviates and causes springs from her like water from a faucet, in tightly controlled bursts that could cause a flood if given sufficient time. When her final judgment is handed down, she collapses like a demolished building and takes you right along with her.

But without an above-the-fray Jim to captivate her, Best can’t make believable Josie’s crucial journey from plaything to girl to woman."
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This production has the love and the mad down pat, but is too seldom inspired enough to join them together to show all the myriad ways in which anguish distorts and distends matters of the heart. That’s necessary for a world that, by play’s end, must abstractly look exactly as this production does at the beginning: a burned-out shell populated by the ghosts of hopes both nurtured and dashed. "

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/Misbegotten2007.html

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Updated On: 4/9/07 at 06:34 PM

Variety is Mixed:

"After some rough handling from the British press during much of his first two seasons as artistic director of the Old Vic, Kevin Spacey found redemption in the glowing London reviews for "A Moon for the Misbegotten." But in its transfer to Broadway, Howard Davies' production of Eugene O'Neill's majestically melancholy play about last chances for love and absolution proves uneven, its equilibrium compromised by Spacey's showboating star turn as Jim Tyrone. He may be supplying what Broadway audiences come to see, but the actor is doing this great role a disservice.............The masterful symbiosis achieved by Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst in Jose Quintero's heartbreaking 1973 Broadway revival (preserved on DVD) may never be equaled. But the imbalance here is especially regrettable given Eve Best's stirring work as Josie. A fixture in recent years on British stages whose credits include an Olivier-winning "Hedda Gabler" for the Almeida, the original "Coast of Utopia" at the National and Davies' production of O'Neill's "Mourning Becomes Electra" at the same address, Best is making a strong Broadway debut.
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From the moment Jim enters, Spacey gives a performance of such swaggering self-regard that it's impossible to believe him as a man made hollow by grief and guilt. A failed Broadway actor who says of himself, "Once a ham, always a ham," Jim's flamboyance is essential. But without a window to his haunted soul, the character is incomplete. Spacey at no time suggests a man so despairing he wishes only to die in his sleep."
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117933309.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

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AM NY gives it 4 Stars:

"Starring Kevin Spacey, Eve Best and Colm Meaney, this is a remarkably wonderful production and a truly must-see theater event, thanks to the cast's astonishing, raw performances. Observing the anxious sparring and difficult romance of Spacey and Best reminds us how the greatest works of O'Neill cannot be merely read. The drama is pushed further when its characters are authentically embodied, and further still when it is directed with such careful sensitivity.

Spacey's acting forcefully conveys the mixture of melancholy and carelessness that is James Tyrone, Jr., bouncing effortlessly through heights of hysteria and drunken dreaming. Eve Best is similarly mesmerizing as Josie, a seemingly rough woman who unwillingly reveals her hidden innocence on what might be deemed a "Long Night's Journey Into Day."

http://www.amny.com/entertainment/stage/am-moonreview0410,0,6657419.story?coll=am-ent-headlines

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Haha!!

I canNOT stand Randi...Phyllis makes me laugh.

The Times review is up. Brantley did it.

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/theater/reviews/10moon.html?ref=theater

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Brantley falls in line with most of the other reviews -- Pro-Best, Anti-Spacey, lukewarm at best for the production itself:

"Mr. Spacey is a polished pro who can play himself like an organ. He dexterously pulls out the stops for sincerity, contempt and the swelling anger of an attention-starved, tantrum-prone child who never grew up.

But aside from a couple of searing moments, as when a delirious Tyrone mistakes Josie for a whore, these disparate notes never blend into the integrated music that makes a character real. The I’m-talking-as-fast-as-I-can delivery, which Mr. Spacey used to more persuasive effect in Mr. Davies’s fine 1999 production of “The Iceman Cometh,” mostly registers as shtick.

Mr. Spacey, by the way, was an excellent Jim Tyrone in the 1986 Broadway revival of “Long Day’s Journey,” a staging that — come to think of it — also had unusual breakneck pacing. Here, he often seems to be paying homage to the star of that production, Jack Lemmon, an actor who specialized in comic distress and sentimental anguish. This is a mistake, since even Mr. Lemmon wasn’t always convincing as Mr. Lemmon.

Mr. Meaney gives a solid, likable performance as Hogan that resists Pappy Yokum cuteness. But the night belongs to Ms. Best, who clearly and winningly maps the contradictory levels of Josie Hogan, both the blustery facade and the sensitive core. Her not matching O’Neill’s description of a big bruiser only feeds our sense that Josie has created a persona to hide behind, as Ms. Best clomps about the stage like a wrestler in search of a match.

The toll of sustaining this facade registers with touching specificity in the play’s penultimate scene, when a weary Josie collapses like a marionette with its strings cut. It has been hard shouldering all that pretense for so long. Of course the realism of the moment is probably enhanced by Ms. Best’s also having had to shoulder the entire emotional weight of a heavy play."

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In a very overcrowded year for Lead Actor in a Play -- there are at least 10 solid contenders -- I doubt Spacey will get a nod. Best has a decent shot (in another crowded category), as does Meaney, but after these reviews, it's very iffy whether the production itself will snag one of the four slots in the revival category.

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Theatremania is A Rave:

"Definitive performances tend to come along every once in a while. In the 1973 version of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst gave performances that are still talked about and cherished.
But molds are made to be broken, as they just have been in Howard Davies' straight-from-London revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, in which Tony and Oscar winner Kevin Spacey and Olivier Award winner Eve Best boldly stake their claims to the roles of the self-destructive Jim Tyrone and the self-styled slut Josie Hogan. Their colliding and clinging during one long night's journey into day is the new standard by which the O'Neill opus will be judged for the foreseeable future.

Spacey, who initially mounted the production to redeem his foundering Old Vic stewardship, has confidently assumed the mantle of being the foremost O'Neill interpreter -- a title that has been up for grabs since Robards' death. To be sure, he was well on his way to taking possession of it with his triumphant Hickey in the production of The Iceman Cometh that opened here eight years ago. It's safe to say that Spacey is the new Robards; and, keeping right up with him, Best is the new Dewhurst.

As directed with gritty intelligence by Davies, the molten-hot revival is even more effective in New York than in London, where the first half was only acceptably workmanlike. Now that the five-person ensemble has played O'Neill's funny, harrowing work for several months and has dug even deeper into the multi-level text, the action on Bob Crowley's nearly barren set -- with its tilted shack, working water pump, and hardscrabble floor -- crackles from first instant to last."


http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/10473

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"It's safe to say that Spacey is the new Robards; and, keeping right up with him, Best is the new Dewhurst."

Sheer blasphemy. The man should be shot on sight.

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USA Today gives it Two-and-a-half Stars:

"This boisterous but oddly tepid Moon first rose at London's Old Vic, where it earned leading man Kevin Spacey some of the most enthusiastic notices he has received during his turbulent tenure as artistic director there. For the show's current engagement, which opened Monday at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, Spacey imported the complete U.K. cast, including the celebrated British stage actress Eve Best and the beloved Irish character actor Colm Meaney.
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Best's Josie and Spacey's Tyrone, in comparison, can play like Kate and Petruchio having a flirtatious spat. Best barrels on stage like an angry construction worker and spends much of the first act shoving men, slamming doors and wringing clothes dry with a similar sense of restless aggression. It could be argued that mannish behavior is supposed to be Josie's defense mechanism, a function of her denial of feminine longing; but this lady protests too much too much.

Best does soften a bit in Spacey's presence, giving the screen star room for his own shtick. Tyrone calls himself a ham, which Spacey and director Howard Davies clearly perceived as license to indulge the sly comic prowess that helped put the actor on the map. His imitation of Meaney's brogue and subsequent impressions and wisecracks delighted the crowd.

But in darker, more crucial moments, we see less of the capacity for unmannered emotional intensity that made Spacey a major player in both film and theater. There are glimmers of it in some of Tyrone's tortured ramblings, just as Best brings wrenching pathos to Josie's patches of despair, particularly in her scenes with Meaney, who is superb as Josie's bumbling father.

Still, this Moon isn't as absorbing or affecting as it should have been. Let's hope its dynamic, resourceful leads are put to better use in future projects."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2007-04-09-moon-misbegotten_N.htm

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